Legal Rights

The NH ACLU has weighed in on a lawsuit against the town of Farmington. In an amicus brief filed in federal court, the organization claims Farmington subjects its employees to a social media policy that violates those employee’s first amendment rights to free speech.

The lawsuit was initiated last year by former Farmington firefighter, Alexander Morin. Farmington fired Morin in 2015, after Morin posted opinions on Facebook during off-duty hours.

A case in Wisconsin is testing the limits of the Fifth Amendment in the digital age. In January, the FBI seized 20 terabytes of hard drives from Jeffrey Feldman, a man accused possessing underage pornography – but could only decrypt 20% of it. Until last week, a federal court judge had placed the burden on the defendant to decrypt the rest or face charges of contempt. Last week, his attorney successfully argued an emergency motion to extend that deadline. She claims that asking Feldman to decrypt files that would be used against him in the case is a violation of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Declan McCullagh is chief political correspondent and senior writer for C-Net and has been following the story.

If grandparents paying for potential grandchildren to be put on ice sounds a little strange, how about the emerging legal field of trust and estate rights for frozen embryos, eggs, and other, well biological material? When word of mouth senior producer Rebecca Lavoie read a Bloomberg Business Week article about a Manhattan lawyer representing frozen embryos in trust cases, she went right to the source to find out more.